Obama’s lawyers bid to regulate religious hiring

http://dailycaller.com ^ | 10/04/2011 | Neil Munro

[massmike]

Barack Obama’s Department of Justice will ask the Supreme Court to eliminate a long-standing legal precedent that protects religious organizations from government regulations.

The department “is going against what almost every court has decided … it has has taken an outlier position,” said Richard Garnett, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame and a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of Law & Religion at Emory University.

On Wednesday, lawyers will present their oral arguments to the Supreme Court in “Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.”

Cheryl Perich taught religion and a secular subject at the Michigan Hoasanna-Tabor school until she fell ill in 2004. When the school replaced her, she sued under the Americans with Disabilities Act. She lost the first round in 2004, but her lawyers persuaded the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati to rule in her favor last year.

The church had argued that her job was not covered by employment law because it was religious and so shielded from federal regulation under the traditional “ministerial exception.” That’s a long-standing term used in courtrooms to describe religious employees’ exemption from secular employment law.

The exemption is a legal spin-off from the Establishment Clause of the Constitution. That is part of the First Amendment, and was adopted in 1791 to shield religious institutions from government regulation, such as the creation of state-funded established churches similar to the Church of England.

The administration’s legal brief asks the court to eliminate this ministerial exemption, and to make all but a few core religious jobs subject to secular employment law.

If the administration’s claim is approved, government-appointed judges “could impose ministers on churches against their will,” said Luke Goodrich, a legal council at the Becket Fund, a religious-liberties group.

[freekitty]

Our Congress is as inept and corrupt as he is.

[Political Junkie Too]

...and to make all but a few core religious jobs subject to secular employment law.

I wonder how Sharia will handle this?

After fighting to allow religious garb in the workplace, now they will be forced to accomodate the workplace requirements in religious jobs?

-PJ

[little jeremiah]

Placemark for pinglist.

[Rashputin]

Shove a few queers and Satanists down the throats of Muslim mosques in this country making sure they have the right to enter the mosque and work therein in spite of their not being Muslim and then maybe I'll believe the contract law being used to shove the camels’ nose under the tent is the real issue.